South Shropshire Success

Shrewsbury Town in the Community continue to go from strength to strength as another successful season comes to an end.

This season has seen record numbers take part in community programmes and with summer Soccer Schools and the NCS programme set to get underway in the coming weeks, things won’t be calming down soon.

One of the big developments for Shrewsbury Town in the Community this season was the expansion of their South Shropshire Hub in Ludlow.

The Ludlow base has allowed the community to expand their work across the county and Community Manager Jamie Edwards has been delighted with the result.

“As part of the end of season reporting we have to do, we have just started counting up the participants and it’s over 10,000 this year”, Jamie told ShrewsWeb.

“In the South Shropshire Hub (Ludlow) alone there have been three and a half thousand people that we have contacted, delivered a project to or have used the facility at Ludlow in the last year, so again that is proving to be a successful project down there as well.

“It’s a mirror image of what we do in Shrewsbury. Although it’s a smaller area in terms of population, it’s actually easier to deliver Advanced Development Centres, the Meadow Memories programme can obviously mirrored down there quite easily and the schools programme.

“I think it is 17 different schools that we are engaging with just in South Shropshire. The Premier League Primary Stars that we have started in Shrewsbury will start to find its way down there over the next 12 months as well.”

Shrewsbury Town in the Community have also taken over the running of the Ludlow Stadium and Jamie believes that has opened a whole range of options for the future.

“It’s taken a while to get over the line with the leases, but we have taken it on for 10 years”, continued Edwards.

“We’ve got £60,000 worth of investment going into a site that originally cost £1.6 million. If you haven’t been there it is a fantastic facility. There’s a full size 3G, which is floodlit, a full size grass pitch that is also floodlit.

“We have a fantastic relationship with Ludlow Juniors who are a fantastic grassroots club with I think over 17 or 18 teams as well, so they are utilising the site. It’s being well maintained and partnerships are growing all over the place with that one.

“And we are hoping to get the first-team down there during the preseason time to hopefully train down there as well.”